Digital Gardens Update: Website and More!

Over the past few days my team and I have focused our efforts towards our outreach plan. Because our project is based upon being informative and providing new data on community gardens we have labeled our work as being a form of awareness as well. In order to get the word out there about our research and data we knew providing  platforms of outreach was integral. Our hope for this project has always been to help the niche audience we are trying to target, so in order to do so we have already set up a digital footprint for ourselves to present our information.

The first web item we have established is a twitter page(https://twitter.com/gardens_dh). As stated before on our social media/outreach plan we decided to go with the networking service for a number of reasons. First being the fact that we wanted our presence to be known on a site that is known to host professional and educational accounts and organizations. Our tone for our project is meant to be informative and educational so we felt twitter was a better option in comparison to instagram and tik tok. Furthermore we wanted a place where we could share findings (online and our own) and connect with others that are involved with green spaces in NYC. We are still in the beginning stages of our twitter since we are still developing our visualizations and logo. For now we left a tweet telling potential followers/viewers that we will have a website up soon..Each week the twitter will be updated by a member of the group. Once we have the bulk of our website finished we will share the link on our page and have a proper header and icon image

Our website in question is a site hosted on the CUNY Academic Commons (https://digitalgarden.commons.gc.cuny.edu/). This web page will display our data visualizations and findings and will also feature a tab that will include audio files taken from interviews in accordance to our ethnographic research. Due to the fact that we are still in the workshopping phase of our website, we don’t know yet how many tabs we will have featured on our page. Perhaps we will create one for various photos we have taken at the gardens as well, since some of us were able to individually visit some during spats of pleasant weather. 2 of our photos have already been used when designing the appearance of our site. The background image was taken at Clinton Community Garden while the header image is from Liz Christy Garden (these images may be subject to change in the event we find something else more suitable). Our font and highlight color are a dark green to keep in theme with the nature aspect of our project. We made the conscious decision to make the shade of green darker than our counterparts Greenthumb and NYCGovParks who opted for a lighter shade of green. This was kind of our subtle way to show that we were a different kind of community garden site, not one that the public has seen before. Aside from our customizations our site for now has an home page describing our project and an about us section that features our personal bios. Additionally our page is public so that those who visit our twitter can click on a link to our site. We are also planning on sending out the url to community garden leaders and those who we wish to interview. Please feel free to visit our site once we have more information up. 

Aside from Twitter and our Cuny commons site we have also decided to start a Facebook page (NYC Community Gardens – Home | Facebook). Our page thus far has some photos taken at community gardens we visited. Once we start visualizing our findings we will try to incorporate that as well. As we mentioned before, community garden Facebook pages are quite inactive but as a way to connect with gardens and message them directly we will keep our Facebook page up. This will also be used as another account to promote our website.  

Lastly, our team member Benjamin has already made progress in the interview section of our project. We managed to get an interview from the oldest community garden member (from 1972)  from the oldest community garden in NYC. The interview audio will be on our website soon. Be sure to check it out once it’s uploaded! Without giving too much away of what he said, we will say that he did mention that he is interested in the specific produce gardens have. This will be something I’ll be looking into soon. Next week Benjamin will be going to East Village for another interview!

Going Forward 

Heading into next week we will continue on our path to visualizing and playing around with the features on Tableau. Since we want to make connections with our data to convey information and stories that have not have had coverage yet, we are utilizing the layering technique for our Tableau maps. Using this will allow us to show 2 forms of data at once which will in turn give the audience a sense of correlation when viewing the infographic. We have already reached out to a Digital Fellow for further assistance on this task and they will hopefully be getting back to us soon. Additionally with some advice taken from Professor. Maney we will also be cleaning up some features on our social media and website. The inclusion of a contact tab and logo image will be up by the end of the week (hopefully). Throughout the rest of the week and the next our work will be more conducive to website building as this will be the main product of our final project.